Sunday, August 14, 2011

Imaginary Horses

It's the middle of August and southern California might be the only place in the country where the weather's beautiful. We used to be the ones with the insufferably hot summers, but the last two years our summer days have been almost--almost cool. Folks are loving it. Me--you know me, I wear a sweater.

Sundays on our block are a good time for the kids to get out and play and for the adults to hang out and talk about whatever, you know, the usual stuff: how to solve the world's problems, who has the nastiest grill, whether or not we should get matching block t-shirts with our names on the back.

I used to wonder why adults did that. Talk, talk, talk was all they ever did. Boring! How could they just stand around and jabber? Why didn't they ride imaginary horses like the rest of us?

18 comments:

Some days my horses have fled across the fields—fled my routine, my worries, my talk. Some days when I come out they're grazing calmly, as if they'd never left. Fickle things; hard to get a saddle on 'em … but here they come again, with soft hooves …

Standing out front, passing time with a bunch of neighbours is what we do while our horses rest up, Petrea.They're always there when we need to ride them.Beautiful, photo, by the way. I remember drawing as a little kid and dad telling me that shadows are purple and blue, not grey. I saw them properly for the first time and it was like someone had just switched on the lights in my brain. This shadow is a wonderful colour.

My brother would have the world believe that I was the only person in the world to ride imaginary horses. It's so nice to know that some of the very best people also had/have them ... and that others see shadows as shades of purple and blue.

Dad wasn't an artist, John, but he loved to draw (mostly aircraft) and encouraged my drawing skills. It's mostlly his fault I'm an architect. He flew on V-bombers out of Cyprus with the RAF, buzzing the southern borders of the USSR with a couple of nukes in the belly back in the days of Doctor Strangelove. He's been gone a while now and I miss him.

I love the tone and the POV of this photo. How you can almost feel the texture of the chalk. When I was 4, I had a stick horse and I'd put on my little red cowboy hat and gallop to all kinds of imaginary places -- especially while the adults were deep in conversation.